Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

Thoughts of an immediate counterattack—a classic ploy among military theorists—were already on Meade’s mind. He soon recognized, however, that the Sixth and Fifth corps were not “pressed up” to launch an attack, nor could they be before dark. In Meade’s commitment to the defensive on Day Three, he had allowed no provision for an offensive—or a counteroffensive. No substantial force was massed and ready to advance. Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, largest in the army, unengaged on the first two days, was scattered from one end of the battlefield to the other to patch holes from the earlier Confederate attacks. Sykes’s Fifth Corps, spread along the army’s left, had seen two of its three divisions severely battered on Day Two and was hardly prepared to spearhead an assault. Skirmishers were sent out “to feel the enemy,” but, said Meade, events conspired to make it “so late in the evening as to induce me to abandon the assault which I had contemplated.”